Cultivating Springtime Wonder
Six tips for using the changing of the season to tap back into our deepest and most beautiful emotions.
Hello Friends!
Welcome back to this month’s Even Greener dive. I can’t believe it’s March. It feels like just yesterday we were sliding into the New Year, complete with all the hope and rage that seems to come with the territory these days. Has it really been two full months? Has it only been two months? Even if the date on the calendar feels unbelievable, the light has shifted and something within me has shifted too.
There’s a game that I like to play with my kids this time of year. Born of winter desperation and motivated by the power of noticing, we go out and look for Signs of Spring. Sometimes this is the whole endeavor, other times it’s tacked onto an errand or a walk to school, but either way it gives me a chance to mark the days by their waking up. Even in early March, the pickings are slim, but ever since the middle of February, I’ve been hanging on tightly to the smallest little wonderful things peeking from the winter grey. There are birds singing early in the morning, tiny green leaves unfurling at the tips of the branches, and the first crocuses of the season.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been curious about why the spring affects me the way it does. Why does noticing the smallest snowdrop change my mood so reliably? How is it possible that birdsong on a bright spring morning can move me almost to tears? What evolutionary purpose does admiring the awakening planet serve? I guess I’ve gone a bit full-throttle on the power of wonder and awe, and in doing so have traced my thought process backwards like the arcs of a spiderweb.
In that tracing, I keep circling back to a few thinkers who are actively shaping how I see the world. Dr. Kate Howlett writes about the power of wonder on her Natural Connections Substack, exploring how it forms in childhood and how easily it can be squeezed out of us by systems that prioritize efficiency over attention. Elena Bridgers takes a human evolutionary perspective, examining how hunter-gatherer societies were structured and what that can teach us about the burdens of modern motherhood. Both, in different ways, ask what kinds of environments might allow humans to thrive in the future.
I sharpened my questions on the stones they laid. Why do humans feel awe at all? What evolutionary benefit could wonder possibly provide? And, closer to my professional wheelhouse, is there a way that understanding this could help people living in cities live healthier, happier lives?
A quick dive into the research on awe led me, surprisingly, to Dr. Jonathan Haidt, whose book The Anxious Generation has become something of a compass as I try to navigate raising children in this wacky world. Before changing the world by illuminating the insidiousness of smartphone use for children and teens, Dr. Haidt’s work with coauthor Dacher Keltner on moral psychology outlined the value of awe as being a reduction of the ego and an opportunity to engage with that which makes us feel infinitely small in the grander scheme of the universe 1. In short, awe expands us. It interrupts rumination and widens attention. It reminds us that we are part of something much larger than ourselves.
And there it is--the convergence that has been germinating in my mind alongside the warming soil. Wonder isn’t sentimental. It’s functional. It’s a way of orienting ourselves toward complexity, toward learning, and toward connection. And we can cultivate it.
I realize this might sound like a digression, I’ve been known to indulge in a bit of intellectual wandering and I won’t apologize for it. But the truth is, nothing captures my attention in isolation. Wondering about wonder is, for me, another expression of it. I am in awe not only of snowdrops and birdsong, but of the fact that human beings evolved minds capable of stepping back and asking these questions at all. And if awe is inspired by observing vast landscapes and amazing feats and it fills us with a humility that shrinks our ego and promotes community, it sounds like something we could use a lot more of these days.
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When I think of the moments that have filled me with awe, I’m almost always standing somewhere looking out into the vaster wilds. It’s a profound feeling, remembering how small we are in comparison to the expanse of the ocean or the majesty of the mountains. There have been moments in my life, particularly when I lived by Lake Michigan and walked my dogs miles and miles along the lovely lakefront, when I made sure to remind myself to really soak it all in--to remember not to take for granted to be somewhere so beautiful.
There’s a line from “I Hope You Dance” by Lee Ann Womack that says “I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean”. They played this song often during my week-long 8th grade graduation ceremonies, and at the time I remember feeling a little peeved that feeling small was something to wish for someone. In my brazen youthfulness and with my hands full of every possible award and certificate that could be won, smallness felt like an insult. It’s a good thing we don’t stay 14 forever.
Because awe, it turns out, is a mechanism of mental and communal recalibration.
Researchers who study awe — including Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt — describe it as an emotion that arises when we encounter perceived vastness combined with a need for cognitive accommodation. Something is so expansive — whether physically, morally, artistically, spiritually--that it stretches the limits of our existing mental framework. For a moment, the self shrinks; not out of shame, but in proportion to the grandeur. This shrinking often produces what psychologists call the “small self” effect: reduced rumination, increased prosocial behavior, and greater openness to others.
Wonder overlaps with awe, but they are not identical twins. Awe tends to be overwhelming and expansive while wonder is quieter. It is the sustained curiosity that follows the initial gasp. If awe is the moment your breath catches at the edge of the Grand Canyon or staring out into the ocean, wonder asks the question: How did this get here? Awe widens the frame and interrupts the narrative. Wonder inquires what else might be in there.
Both, I suspect, are deeply functional.
From an evolutionary perspective, emotions that reliably oriented us toward safety, abundance, and community would have been advantageous. Looking out over a broad landscape with open sightlines and visible resources may have signaled security. Gathering for childbirth, rituals, storms, or seasonal migrations would have required collective cohesion. Experiences that dwarfed the individual likely reinforced interdependence. Awe, in this framing, becomes a sort of social glue which turns us toward one another when we are confronted with something larger than ourselves.
And yet, while the capacity for awe and wonder may be universal, the conditions that evoke them are not guaranteed. We are remarkably capable of missing awe-inspiring or wonder-filled moments as our own lives often take on the harried focus sold to us as “optimization”. On top of this, it’s notoriously easy to get distracted by the smartphones in our pockets, the vicious news cycle, and the day-to-day needs of a world that feels unsettled at best and doomed at worst. When we compress our experiences into scrollable inches and frames for mass-consumption, there’s little room left for the kind of perceptual spaciousness that awe requires.
Here lies the paradox: awe and wonder are often spontaneous. They arise when the environment is right, both externally and internally. We cannot schedule transcendence for 4:30 p.m. on a Tuesday and expect to be able to deliver a report about it afterwards.
But we can cultivate the conditions that make it more likely that we feel awe and wonder more often.
Finding wonder begins with a deliberate widening of our attention. It requires making space both physically and psychologically to notice what is already present 2. In our efficiency-driven culture, powered by metrics and built on systems that seek to maximize yields, this feels counterintuitive. And yet the research suggests the opposite: regular experiences of awe are associated with improved mood, increased generosity, and even measurable physiological shifts, including reductions in inflammatory markers.
Beyond these personal benefits, expanding our openness to wonder might be a critical point in helping us reconnect to and protect the environments that support and sustain us. It is my professional mission and the hill upon which I will die to remind people that their environment is wherever they happen to be. We spend enormous energy trying to get “out there” to find beauty, when much of what we seek is already embedded in our daily landscapes if we only know how to look. It stands to reason then that learning to cultivate wonder and awe right where we spend the majority of our time might be exactly the recipe for improving our wellbeing, our environments, and our communities.
Bringing awe into our daily lives isn’t a new idea. Humans, after all, have long tried to evoke awe in spheres beyond wilderness. Cathedrals, symphonies, literature, fireworks, communal dance and countless other creations are attempts to bottle this deep emotion by placing the individual within something magnificent, shared, and enduring.
The question, then, is not whether awe and wonder exist in urban life but how we can better position ourselves to perceive them.
This is where spring re-enters the story.
For the rest of this meandering, let’s explore how we can use the budding season to maximize wonder — and consider how awe might meet us in our increasingly urban lives.
Winter is a season of hunkering down. Across cultures and ecosystems, shorter days signal a slowdown. Energy is reserved, attention narrows, and both mind and body tune toward efficiency and routine 3. Our physiology mirrors the environment. Reduced light alters melatonin and serotonin cycles, lowering arousal and encouraging inward focus. By the time spring rolls around, it’s almost as if we’ve forgotten what expansiveness feels like.
Spring, by contrast, is a season of sensory expansion. Lengthening days flood our brains with light, which increases serotonin and dopamine availability and reduces melatonin. This together heightens alertness, mood, and curiosity 4. The environment itself changes in ways that call our attention: buds emerge, birds return, insects hum. These novelties stimulate our attentional networks, engaging perception and memory in ways that winter does not.
Our attention matches the complexity of the changing seasons because we evolved to pay attention. It served our survival to increase attentional engagement in spring because observing what was changing pointed toward resources, social opportunities, and environmental cues that helped early humans survive 1. This wonder and awe, reawakening after months of cold and dark, haven’t left us.
Instead of going about with business as usual, spring gives us an opportunity to hone our wonder and inspire our awe. When every day brings new things to notice, each detail can become an invitation to pause, to observe, and to connect with the environment, with others, and with ourselves. Our senses stretch in tandem with the season, reminding us that we are embedded in an awakening world, and that noticing is itself a form of participation in the environment we are a part of.
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A Beginner’s Guide to Cultivating Springtime Wonder
Spring does not guarantee awe. It simply makes it more likely. Light increases and with it comes the budding of the trees, the emergence of the first flowers, and the return of the insects and birdsong. Our attention is primed to observe these things, and while we can’t force wonder to arrive for us in a perfectly packaged parcel, we can certainly cultivate the conditions where it might find us.
Here are a few places to begin.
1. Play “Signs of Spring”
The Signs of Spring game I mentioned in the opening has become a seasonal transition tradition, but it’s also partly a good old fashioned coping strategy to get through the dregs of winter. By paying attention to the positive signs that the world is waking up, we hone our attention, build excitement, and notice small changes day-to-day.
It’s easy to try it. On your way to school, to the train, to the grocery store-- anywhere you frequently walk or linger outside--look for little things that were not there the last time. This could be the first crocus pushing through cold soil, a bird carrying nesting material, or even the way the air smells faintly damp instead of icy. Use all your senses and experiment with noticing something you would normally overlook.
The point is not spectacle. We’re not looking for major revelations or extravagant changes, just taking the time to notice the beginning edges of moving back towards the sun.
Wonder begins with pattern recognition, reveling in the thrill of realizing the world is not static. Playing Signs of Spring allows you to witness the beauty of life in motion.
Try it for a week. Search for three signs a day. See what happens to your mood.
2. Widen Your Sensory Bandwidth
Winter is a season of narrowing. There’s a lot of talk about resolutions around New Years (my own included), but for the most part, our inclinations are to stay in and stay warm. We spend a lot of time moving from heated house to heated car to heated building with our heads down against the cold. Life becomes smaller and more task-oriented because it’s a season of survival.
Springtime is a chance to open our lens and sit with it.
Senses, like muscles or other aptitudes, can be trained and expanded. Choose a small block of time to expand your sensory experience.
To practice this, sit or stand outside (without your headphones or phone) for a few uninterrupted minutes.
Ask yourself what layers of sounds can you hear? What is moving? How does the air feel on my skin? What can I smell? Try to tune in on where certain sounds and smells are coming from, see if you can find the bird that’s calling or pick out a couple different birdsongs.
Awe requires perceptual spaciousness. It cannot compete with constant input. Sometimes the simplest shift in our presence is enough to let the environment back in.
3. Seek a Small Vastness
We tend to associate awe with extraordinary places that most of us don’t visit every day. Awe certainly lives in the canyon, the mountain range, and along the ocean, but if the human creative spirit has shown us anything, it is that vastness is relative.
Look for an expanse of vastness in the sky framed between buildings at dusk. Even in most cities you can see a few stars or the moon.
Admire the intricate geometry of a budding tree. Trace the fractal patterns with your eyes and see if you can pinpoint the moment where bud ends and sky begins.
Take a minute to be a visitor in your own town. Step into a local church or cathedral, a library, or a museum gallery and feel your voice naturally soften. Admire the craftsmanship on something that’s been lovingly created.
Look for something that stretches your mental frame just slightly beyond its usual borders and let yourself feel small and connected to the rest of the world around you.
There is relief in remembering we are not the center of everything.
4. Practice the “Small Self” Pause
When something catches your breath, resist the reflex to immediately document it. I know the itch to reach for your phone to snap a photo, and I’m not saying that documentation isn’t a good part of appreciation, but have you considered that extending your personal enjoyment of the beauty first might give you an even greater appreciation of what you’re seeing. A chance to count the petals on the daffodil or admire the way the bumblebee buzzes just so to fill her abdomen with pollen.
Instead of reaching immediately for your phone, take the opportunity to pause. Let your nervous system register what it’s seeing.
You can ask yourself what about this feels larger than me? How might this particular thing have gone on if I hadn’t noticed? How long might I have missed it?
Researchers call this softening of ego that often accompanies awe the “small self” effect. That softening tends to increase generosity and connection and makes us more open to seeing good and beautiful things elsewhere.
It turns out that feeling smaller in the right context makes us more expansive toward others.
5. Track One Daily Shift
Spring rarely explodes all at once and so there can be a particular magic in the little milestones along the way. We like to celebrate the first afternoons of wearing shorts by referring to it as a Knees Day! By June, it won’t feel special, but right now it sure does, and so we name and embrace it.
Consider keeping a tiny log of springtime. This could be a quick note in your phone or a line in a notebook or even a sweet little memory you make up.
You can include things like “first open window,” “first evening light lingering past dinner,” “first day you didn’t need gloves”. It becomes a bit of a mental scrapbook, documenting the unfurling of the season around you and rooting in gratitude.
This kind of subtle tracking trains your brain to look for continuity instead of crisis, which also can be protective against the vicious news cycle.
6. Re-Enter Shared Space
Awe is not only solitary. It is social glue.
Humans have always gathered around experiences that dwarf the individual. For as long as humans have been around, we have shared in the power of rituals, performances, storms, migrations, births and countless other milestones of creative, seasonal, and human origins. To be with other people is deeply human. Reconnecting with our broader community beyond our family groups is one of the simplest ways to expand our wonder in springtime.
As the weather warms, look for events in your community. These can be anything: from farmers markets, outdoor concerts, gatherings with friends, or volunteer workdays, whatever strikes your fancy. Get outside and get active with people in a shared venue. Talk to people, make little conversations about the weather. Look for something to point out to others--a rainbow, a flower, a particularly awesome bird. People love coming together over something to admire.
Shared vastness recalibrates us. It reminds us that attention is not only personal, it is collective. And the future lies in community
Spring is already widening the world around you. The light is doing its work. The buds are unfolding on a schedule that we don’t write. There’s nothing optimized about this burgeoning springtime moment, and that’s the real power of it.
The opportunity is there for us to widen along with the world around us. To tap back into the evolutionary roots of our attention and enjoy the sunshine and the Signs of Spring
In the process, we build our capacity for something stronger. Wonder and awe aren’t sentimental. They’re functional emotions that have evolved to keep us together, to keep us whole. Wonder interrupts rumination. Awe reorients us toward complexity. Both together soften the ego just enough to let connection back in.
And this season, perhaps more than most, that feels like something worth practicing.
Wishing you lots of love and sunshine, always.
Elsa
References
Keltner D, Haidt J. 2003 Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognitive Emotions.17(2):297-314. doi: 10.1080/02699930302297.
Van De Goor J., Sools A., Westerhof G., Bohlmeijer, E. (2020). Wonderful Life: Exploring Wonder in Meaningful Moments. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 60, 147 - 167. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022167817696837.
Foster RG, Roenneberg T. (2008) Human Responses to the Geophysical Daily, Annual and Lunar Cycles. Current Biology 18(17) R784 - R794
Riby LM. (2013) The Joys of Spring: Changes in Mental Alertness and Brain Function.Experimental Psychology 60(2) https://doi.org/10.1027/1618-3169/a000166
Great tips! ❤️